Hey Alka, I had a quick question for you (whenever you have the time to answer or even if you have the time), I've been taking some storyboard classes and with my illustration background, it's been hard to really find a good shorthand for characters to really get that anatomy/gesture looking right without it being too sketchy and unreadable.
How long did it take you to find your storyboard shorthand, and what exercises would you recommend to try to find it? I'm sure it just takes time and practice, I've been doing a lot more studies and gesture drawings (currently following along all the free Glenn Vilppu videos I can find on youtube) but I wanted to ask you as well because I am in love with how fluid your anatomy is, and how clear your storyboards read. And those hands my god you're a wizard!!!
Thanks a bunch, have a wonderful day!
Heya Secret, great to hear from ya! Well, what you don’t see online is how gross the rough stage of my boards can get LMFAO. Most of the boards I post are actually overly cleaned up because I'm just doing them for fun and can afford the time! I'm not really sure how long it took to develop my shorthand, I've never really enjoyed drawing detail to begin with, so when I decided to go into boarding I kinda just leaned into it!
I’ve covered a bunch of gesture drawing exercises already if you scroll through my advice tag, but ***once you have a good foundation*** here's some stuff you can try!
First you'll want to build up an arsenal of anatomy hacks you can always fallback on, particularly for complex parts of the body. The less time you spend on details, the more time you have to focus on the overall pose and storytelling. Aim to find ways to draw with as FEW lines as possible. If I had to make a list to streamline what to practice:
Head shapes - find the most efficient way to draw the front + 3/4 + side view in as few lines as possible (the challenge is still making them look structured with dimension)
Eyes - are SO important for expressions! Unless your project has characters with dot eyes, you're going to need to find a quick way to do the circle and iris in as few lines as possible. Make sure you can convey where they're looking
Hands - fists (you'll be drawing a lot of people holding poles), open palms at various angles, foreshortened fingers pointing at viewer, fingers making grabby motions----protips: 1) half the time all you need is a vague triangle/rectangle plus thumb sticking up and that's a hand 2) if the hand is relaxed, you probably don't need to draw the knuckles. Save some time!
Feet - just learn how to make sure they look like they're standing on the ground, and do some studies of what they look like when you're running. Otherwise you can usually get away with a vague shoe or boot shape (just add toe lines if they're not wearing any)
----everything else you'll practice as you go!
Jump from SUPER rough straight into clean boards to really force yourself to be economic. I've done each of these methods for work before:
Before you start boarding with a character, sketch them a few times with the intention of simplifying their design while keeping them recognizable:
You'd be surprised how little you need to recognize a character:
Depending on the scene, you can adjust how much detail you want to include:
Stay loose/more generalized with action, especially for the "inbetweens" between key poses. Clean up enough to communicate movement and make the character recognizable.
If the character's small on screen in a wide shot, edit out most details and focus on the silhouette
Save the detail work for character acting, when you really want to be specific with their expressions and gestures.
But outside of all that, be bold and fearless!! Everyone has that stage where their boards look like spaghetti! Boarding is like handwriting; you could have really shitty chicken scratch, but if you're writing beautiful poetry, who cares!
god I love drawing hands you don’t even know thank you so much!! Good luck dude!! You’ve more than got this!!
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